Problem with Follow and directional casting

I got Multibox all setup and running in about 30 seconds (kudos to Micah) and fiddled around with my two mages. Things seem to work well for the most part and i'm guessing it will take me a while to get used to it but there is one thing I could certainly use some help with.

First my setup:

For the mage on the 2nd box, I removed all movement key bindings and made macro's for all the offensive spells with minor variations of the following:

/cast [target=focustarget] Frostbolt
/follow <Name>

When I log in the 2nd mage I set the focus to my first mage and in the follow command I use the name of my 1st mage because I haven't yet figured out how to make /follow work any other way.

I have Multibox setup to only broadcast keys (not mouse). The 2nd mage follows me around just fine, and will cast fine as long as i'm moving forward. The problem arises when I have to Frostnova a target and then back a few feet away, turn around, and start casting. When I do this, the 2nd mage ends up in front and facing me when I turn around on my 1st mage to start casting. Becuase he's facing me, he obviously can't be casting at the target behind him and I get the expected "Target must be in front you" message.

So i'm wondering how others have gotten around this. The only thing i've been able to do so far is on my first mage when I turn to run around, I get to the point where I want to stop and do a 180 degree turn, then walk forward toward the target a few steps. This causes the 2nd mage to then go behind me and also do the 180 turn. This is far from ideal because by the time I get done with all the movement and positioning, the frostnova has roughly 1 second before it breaks.

To give you some context, i've been taking both mages (lvl 65 and lvl 60) into Blood Furnace to farm XP, gold, rep, etc. With two sheeps most of the fights are trivial but Frostnovas are used quite a bit. The tactic being pew pew, Frostnova, get some distance, turn around and pew pew some more.

I hope my explanation makes sense and some of the experienced multi-boxers can give me a few pointers on how to improve my setup / macros. I'm also questioning weather the /follow attached to the end of each spell macro is needed and if I should instead have a single key bound that I can spam the follow when I need it. Thoughts?

You can do /follow focus by the way.

As for the turning thing, if you have an unused keyboard key you could bind it to turn both characters at the same time. Then when you need to spin you hold that down and both characters would turn instead of just the one. You would handle things mostly the same way except when you got your distance you would turn with that instead of with the mouse like normal.

The other option is to use Arcane Missile because it will cause your character to face the target, no matter which way you start out facing. Of course, you don't get the frost effect but your other mage is frost bolting so the creep will be slowed.

Thanks for the response Micah, that makes perfect sense and i'll for sure give that a try.

As far as the /follow macro goes, I kept trying /follow [target=focus] and it kept failing. Didn't even think to try /follow focus

Just a quick note regarding the follow macros; I'm using:

/follow party1

for my follow macro.

For my target macro I use:

/cleartarget
/target party1target

I tried Micah's suggestion and really fumbled with the turning of both toons at the same time. In order for that to work I had to remove the /follow from each of the combat macros (i.e. Frostbolt) which also meant I had to dedicate a key to follow and make sure to remember to push that regularly.

I haven't yet decided if having it how it was originally is better or keep the new turn keys and just practice more.

As for targeting, setting up all my damage spells with /cast [target=focustarget] <spell> is working beautifully. I never have to worry about specific targeting keys for the secondary toons because they always cast at whatever i'm targeting with my main (who is setup to be the focus of each of the alts).

I'm still swimming in my complete newbishness of multi-boxing and writing macros, but i'm having a blast at it. So many new and exiting things to try now :)

Thx for the info on your setup Trig. Seeing how others have thier setups working will really help me tweak and fine tune my own.

I play 2 casters so I initially ran into this problem also when one is not facing the right way.

I use Micah's multibox.

What I did was on CasterA I use the W, A, S, D keys to move and unbind my directional arrow keys.

On CasterB I unbind the W, A, S, D buttons and keep the directional arrow keys as is.

So, when I am playing on my main box if CasterB is facing the wrong way I just simply use the directional arrow buttons to turn him around(or move him) and it doesn't affect CasterA.

Also, I would not have the "/follow <name>" in your macro. What this would do is that once you get CasterB turned in the right direction(facing the mob), if CasterB is in front of CasterA, he would then turn around to face CasterA as soon as you hit the macro cause /follow always makes you face your target.

Hope that all makes sense.

I have actually considered trying to play two characters completely independently of each other and may try it once I hit 70. The idea would be to have the left half of the keyboard setup for character A and the right half of the keyboard setup for character B and try to play them separately with their own movement, action buttons, etc.

I am a big proponent of using the mouse for movement because you get a better response time for many things but I may be willing to give that up in order to play two characters at 90% utilization. In fact, the only way I would multi-box PvP was if I could control all characters individually with 80%+ utilization and even then it would be for BGs only, not Arenas.

I know, I would love to play with a mouse. But I'm a lazy dual boxer and play lying down on my couch with 2 laptops.